El Mirage: Hot Rodding Holy Land

We won’t ever know who was the first guy to throttle across a dry lakebed in the Southern California desert, or when—though it can be argued that he’s the very first hot rodder. Sure, you can point to the guys who raced stripped-down speedsters on board tracks, public-road courses, and even at the Indianapolis Speedway in the 19-oughts; they were certainly an influence on what would become hot rodding. But sometime in the ’20s, when our man knocked the fenders off his Model T or Chevy four-banger and sought top speed on the silt, the real seeds of this entire thing were sown in the hardpacked, dry, level, vast alkali of the Mojave Desert dry lakes.

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The History

According to tribal knowledge, the earliest scenes on the lakes were outlaw deals where guys could bring their chopped-up cars far flung from the annoyance of the urban coppers and let it all hang out. Though the term wasn’t known at the time, they were essentially drag racing, going at it wheel-to-wheel, sometimes many cars wide. Cars barrel rolled. Guys died. That didn’t stop the races, which were hard earned. The dry lakes of Rosamond, Harper, Muroc, and El Mirage are all at least 100 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Most were accessed on the 1921-built, twisting, two-lane Mint Canyon Road, later known as Lancaster Road, then Route 6, and now Sierra Highway. In 1928, gas was just 20 cents a gallon, but that meant a commitment of at least $4 for the round trip, significant to a racer who probably earned less than $150 a month. The trip also meant camping, bringing food and lean-tos from home, or getting supplies from the relatively new and small towns of Palmdale and Adelanto or the more established Lancaster or Rosamond. Once on the lakes, temperatures in summer could crest 100 during the day—this in a time when no one wore shorts or T-shirts—and dip to the 50s at night. You only drank the water you brought. Or the beer. Your car burned the gasoline you hauled in.

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According to Hollywood Hot-Rod Manual, written by R.G. Peers in May 1947, the races began to become organized in about 1930 at Muroc Dry Lake, near the military Muroc Air Base that opened in 1933. Racing clubs were soon formed, and some sense of responsibility began to develop within the hobby that was already gaining a hoodlum reputation. Perhaps the earliest organizational body was the Muroc Racing Association, holding events as early as 1933. In late 1937—roughly 10 years after racing probably started on the lakes—the clubs joined together to form the Southern California Timing Association (SCTA), which held its first race in May 1938 at Muroc. Two of the charter SCTA clubs remain active now: the Road Runners and the Sidewinders. The Road Runners founded the SCTA Racing News, and member Wally Parks—who cartooned the club logo that’s still used today—soon became editor. Ten years later he’d become the editor of HOT ROD magazine.

7/27One of the regulars at El Mirage is well-known customizer and metal man Gene Winfield (in the driver suit) in a flathead-Ford-powered tribute to his The Thing Model T racer from the ’50s.

The SCTA races were no longer held wheel-to-wheel, not so much in the interest of safety, but because the rudimentary timing equipment was only operated in one lane. Top-speed hot rod racing had become official, though the term “hot rod” wasn’t used then. The cars were “hot roadsters” (perhaps hot rod is a bastardization of that), “soup-ups,” or “gow jobs.” Wally once told us that “gow” was a term used like, “it’s got gow,” meaning, “it’s a goer.”

Even before WWII, there were problems with dry-lakes racing. Generalizing reports we’ve read or heard, Harper was small, Rosamond was too soft, and both it and Muroc fell too close to the military base and were restricted as early as 1938. And then came the biggest problem: WWII. The government called for an end to auto racing in early 1942. When it returned in 1945, El Mirage dry lake became the center of most of the action. The SCTA was no longer the only organizer, as the Western, Rusetta, Mojave, Pacific Coast, Arnon, and Bell Timing Associations all popped up. Those outfits were all gone by the early ’60s, and SCTA is the last one standing. It has held events at El Mirage every year since 1945.

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Postwar El Mirage SCTA races led directly to the formation of this magazine, and it’s not egomaniacal for us meager staffers of today to credit HOT ROD for the popularity of hot rodding nationwide, if not worldwide. Hence our belief that El Mirage is hallowed ground—a callback to the dry-lakes races of the ’30s and the roots of the family tree.

What Came Next

A few other dry lakes were raced on after the war—including Cuddleback in the Mojave in the early ’50s and Laguna Salada in Baja Mexico in the late ’60s. While HOT ROD magazine was founded on coverage of races in the SoCal deserts, it had only been in print three years when, in his Jan. ’51 editorial column, Wally Parks announced that the dry lakes were essentially too torn up to use any more, and that Bonneville was the only safe place to attempt 200 mph. He predicted that drag racing was the future, founded the National Hot Rod Association later that year, and hosted his first drag race in 1953. While Bonneville Salt Flats race coverage endured, dry-lakes coverage all but vanished.

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In the following years, Harper was flooded to become a marshland. The lakes of Rosamond and Muroc (now called Rogers) were absorbed into the boundaries of the former Muroc Air Base—now Edwards Air Force Base, where the space shuttles used to land. The surface of Muroc/Rogers is marked with the world’s largest compass rose, used by NASA. In 1996 through 2000, the SCTA managed to organize races at Muroc/Rogers, though security measures after the 9/11 attacks have fairly well ensured that will never happen again. So El Mirage has become home base.

16/27Shug Hanchard has run a number of cars under the moniker So-What Speed Shop, most of them vintage four-bangers. This one in his Vintage 4 Flathead/Blown Gas Modified Roadster uses a Model A four with a head from Charlie Yapp (SecretsOfSpeed.com) and a Thunderbird Super Coupe’s Eaton supercharger.

17/27Shug Hanchard has run a number of cars under the moniker So-What Speed Shop, most of them vintage four-bangers. This one in his Vintage 4 Flathead/Blown Gas Modified Roadster uses a Model A four with a head from Charlie Yapp (SecretsOfSpeed.com) and a Thunderbird Super Coupe’s Eaton supercharger.

Today: You Should Come Watch

While the Bonneville Salt Flats has owned the pop culture, El Mirage is more hard core and historic and should be on the bucket list of any hot rodder. The SCTA holds races at El Mirage six times a year, from May through November but not in August (when Speed Week is held at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah). The May and November events are two days, while the others are Sundays only. The events are open to spectators at no charge by the SCTA, but the dry lake now falls within the El Mirage Dry Lake Off-Highway Vehicle Recreation Area, which is controlled by the Bureau of Land Management that charges $15 for a day pass or $30 for a week. It’s open year-round, though you can’t drive on the lakebed any time it’s wet or muddy. The OHV area includes camping and a number of trails to explore by foot, 4x4, or ATV.

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19/27Another car in the Vintage 4 Flathead engine class is the Lattin & Gillette Vintage Gas Coupe. It’s a ’30 American Austin coupe, a brilliant car for the underpowered four-banger classes because it’s so tiny and therefore has much less frontal area and less aero drag than, say, a ’30 Ford Model A coupe. The engine is a ’32 Ford flathead four, and it holds the record at 104.067 mph. It’s often about personal achievements and not all-out speed.

How It Works

Top-speed racing at El Mirage uses the same rules and class structure as those at Bonneville. The whole point is to run faster than anyone else who has raced in your car or motorcycle class. The main difference is that Bonneville offers racetracks with up to five timed miles, and the records are set over a flying mile; records also must be backed up with a second run on the same real estate. At El Mirage, the course is just 1.3 miles, timed with a 132-foot speed trap at the end. A single pass gets you a record with no backup run.

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At Bonneville, classes that no one has raced in have open records of 0.00 mph, so any pass you back up in that class can become a record, no matter how slow it is (a few years ago we limped to a briefly held 35-mph record on two cylinders in an open class). At El Mirage there’s a championship based on points earned by setting records and exceeding them by a significant margin. Hence, the open classes at the lake have published record minimums you need to exceed before scoring a record. There are no freebies.

24/27Larry “Axle” Foley works for Mike Kilger Metalworks, where he built this heavily chopped ’69 Subaru 360 powered by a Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle 900cc, four-valve, water-cooled engine in the front. It uses a Toyota rear axle and a VW link-pin front suspension.

25/27The Aardema-Braun-Sheridan Fuel Rear-Engine Modified Roadster is a contraption loaded with junkyard parts. The Model A four-cylinder block is topped with one of Pete Aardema’s single-overhead-cam conversions. It feeds a chain drive to a spur gear that changes the direction of the power to send it to a Ford Escort transaxle mounted the wrong way, which then has twin chain-drives to the rear axle.

As we’ve written many times, setting records at El Mirage is more difficult than at Bonneville, and far more challenging than at the paved standing-mile events. One reason is the record minimums, another is that the track is much shorter so there’s less time to accelerate, but the big deal is the lousy track surface. Because traction is such an issue, the persistent racers are rewarded with better spots in line. The more points you’ve earned by setting records or just participating, the farther ahead you’ll be in line. It’s not like the first-come-first-served program at Bonneville. On the dry lake, you’re racing on powdery silt that’s only tenuously clumped together, and the surface quickly gets torn up so you’re churning the tires through loose dirt. Expect the cockpit to fill with a fog of dust that may prevent you from seeing anything but the large balloons that float about 20 feet off the ground at the finish line. Your car will have to bounce and sway through the ruts left by the racers ahead of you, and to go really fast, you better have a lot of weight or downforce for traction. It takes balls. A person with an El Mirage 200 MPH Club maroon hat is a big deal. And the 300 MPH chapter? There are only five of those guys. Supergods.

What You’ll See

26/27One of the most successful cars at El Mirage is Ron and Robbie Cohn’s Chevy Monza that currently holds 11 records in various combinations of body and engine classes, the fastest of which is 205.844 in C/Classic Production.

Your experience won’t be far removed from that of those pioneers in the ’20s. From Los Angeles, you’ll follow much the same path. You’ll pay an inflation-adjusted twice as much for gas, but at least you’ll probably have air conditioning. That won’t make El Mirage seem any less remote than it was in the ’40s: from the starting line, you’re at least 15 miles from a semblance of civilization. If you choose to race or camp, the conditions are going to bite back just like they did before the war.

For out-of-towners, the scenery of the Mojave Desert alone will be a mind-blower, dotted with Joshua trees that look like something drawn by Dr. Seuss. The dry lake itself is unusual even for Southwesterners: it’s roughly 6x2 miles of smooth silt and clay. The basin of the lake floods to a shallow depth during the winter, and desert winds blow the water back and forth, polishing and leveling the surface as it dries. The amount of water and the rate of drying determine the consistency of the summer surface, which is riddled with its signature cracks. If the top surface is harder than what’s underneath, it can peel up into slabs of clay called potato chips.

27/27We see more classic muscle cars at Elmo than we do on the salt, though many of them struggle with aero. This ’67 Camaro with a screw-blown 302 has been thrashing against a 196-mph record that’s been held by a Pinto for 22 years, and finally beat it in May 2013 with a 197.390.

At the races, expect a freak show. Most of that comes from the spectators, who bring a huge variety of unusual campers and desert cruisers. There will also be a good smattering of fan hot rods and customs. In the pits, you’ll see the type of unusual race-car mods that land-speed racing is known for: freaky engine swaps, radical top chops, ludicrously overpowered little cars, and incredibly tiny engines, and much of this applied to unusual body styles. HOT ROD’s Gray Baskerville always used to tell us that Bonneville is the last bastion of unfettered little-guy racing, but we’ve got to reassign that to El Mirage. There’s way more low-buck stuff going on here from many racers who can’t afford the annual trek to the salt flats. And you’ll never see a General Motors race team with a semi truck or press-tent catered lunches at Elmo. Frankly, it’s a miserable dust bowl of a place where you get Pigpen’d, sweat, spin out, and work way too hard for records with only a reward of personal accomplishment.

You’ll probably recognize the place from the many TV commercials, music videos, and movies shot there every year. The lakebed is used by off-roaders as well as land sailers, remote-control airplane operators, and ultralight fliers. Small private planes may land there as well, and often do during races. If you’re into planes, the adjacent Aviation Warehouse (AviationWarehouse.net) is a pretty amazing aircraft wrecking yard that rents planes and parts to movie productions.

We love it. Hope to see you out there. Head to SCTA-BNI.org to find more information.

The Fastest Guys on Dirt

As of August 2013, here are the top five fastest records at El Mirage Dry Lake. Stop for a minute and think of 300-plus mph in a mile and a third on dirt. Also, curiously, the fastest car at El Mirage is a Lakester (open wheels) rather than a Streamliner. Note that four of the five top records involve one man: Les Leggitt of Leggitt Engines, a high-school wood-shop teacher who is also the crew chief for his Nitro Pirate vintage Funny Car. He and Larry Lindsley also have a 300-mph, blown-fuel-Hemi-powered Firebird that owns a 308-mph record at Bonneville, and that has run a 333-mph flying mile, the fastest ever for any production-bodied car.